barber

The Barber’s Trade Union
Among the makers of modern India, chandu, the barber boy of our village, has a place which will be denied him unless I press for the recognition of his contribution to history. Chandu’s peculiar claim to recognition rested, to tell the truth, on an exploit of which he did not know the full significance. But then, unlike most great men of India today, he had a very exaggerated notion of his own importance, though he shared with them a certain native egotism which was sometimes disconcerting and sometimes rather charming. I knew chandu ever since the days when he wore a piece of rag in the middle of his naked distended-bellied body, and when we wallowed together in the mire of the village lanes, playing at soldiering, shop keeping, or clerking and other little games which we invented for the delectation of our two salves and our mothers, who alone of all the elders condensed to notice us. Chandu was my senior by about six months, and he always took the lead in all matters. And I willingly followed, because truly he was a genius at catching wasps, and at pressing the poison out of their tails, at tying their tiny legs to cotton thread and flying them, while I always got stung on the cheeks if I dared to go anywhere near the platform of the village well where these insects settled on the puddles to drink water. When we grew up he still seemed to me the embodiment of perfection, because he could make and fly paper kites of such delicate design and of such balance as I could never achieve. To be sure, he was not so good at doing sums at school as I, perhaps because his father apprenticed him early to the hereditary profession of the barber’s caste and sent him out hair-cutting in the village, and he had no time for the home tasks which our school master gave us. But he was better than I at reciting petry, any day, for not only did he remember by rote the verses in the text-book, but he could